711–720 of 765 posts
I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…
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> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in…
>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride…
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“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.” Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the comp…
In software specifically, we're now at year two+ where the entirety of investment and innovation is in literally replacing people. We have CEOs and prominent figureheads making openly hostile statements about replacing their software workforce with LLMs, and coming out with bold proclamations about whatever models are going to be better than whatever title of developer in $TIME. How there can be any loyalty or long-t…
When I switch from development to running IT, I sat with people to understand how the company worked. Everyone I sat with was terrified I was going to automate away their jobs.
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here's a counterpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Finance > One of the main themes of the book is the role played by the central bankers' insistence to adhere to the gold standard "even in the face of total catastrophe."[1] As Joe Nocera, a book reviewer at the New York Times, stated, "the central bankers were prisoners of the economic orthodoxy of their time: the powerful belief that sound monetary polic…
The argument that the gold standard was some kind of economic straitjacket that worsened the Great Depression is nothing more than elite gaslighting, a convenient myth peddled by central bankers and Keynesian apologists to justify their disastrous experiments with fiat money. The reality is that the gold standard didn't fail; governments and central banks did. Take Britain's catastrophic return to gold in 1925. Churc…
Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…
It's possible to do both: you can collect your paycheck WHILE looking for a better job (because this one is toxic). And now you know to interview more seriously the people at that potential new employer. An essential part of "the job" is to get done what the company wants you to do. Even when that's stupid. Fair. But toxic jobs are still toxic to us, and staying is still our decision. Pending finding another better j…
No one will tell you during recruitment process about shit show they have or crazy manager. Or even if there was a nice team you've been interviewed to, after onboarding you could be reassigned to the toxic team to fix legacy code.
The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…
Among average people, it seems there's widespread understanding that things are collectively getting worse. The next 50 years are more likely to bring turmoil than prosperity, with climate change, AI, and political instability all getting worse every year. Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social u…
Iphone costs same $1000 but provides you massive improvements compare to iphone 10y ago.
You can argue cars are more expensive but you got more power, more features, safer vehicle. And in poor countries you can still buy cheap cars with modern technology.
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>> GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't. > Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE. The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that. It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fa…
> The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that. No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
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“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.” Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the comp…
I'd also say we are lost in scale. The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons. I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful pl…
Eloquently put. This is what drives me nuts about Brian Chesky. He wants employees to take ownership - but doesn't give them any ownership.
If I worked for BNB and was aggressively pursuing a new idea, I could still be laid off any second because of his ego. That isn't ownership.
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The argument that the gold standard was some kind of economic straitjacket that worsened the Great Depression is nothing more than elite gaslighting, a convenient myth peddled by central bankers and Keynesian apologists to justify their disastrous experiments with fiat money. The reality is that the gold standard didn't fail; governments and central banks did. Take Britain's catastrophic return to gold in 1925. Churc…
As long as US Dollar supply was increasing at the rate of 2% per year (I don't know the exact rate but some predictable small rate) which is commensurate with Gold supply increase, everything was ok with the world, nobody cared whether it was USD or Gold. It is only when US started abusing this privilege that system started breaking.
The idea that the Fed "matched" gold supply growth with disciplined printing is historical revisionism at its worst. Throughout the 1950s, the Fed quietly monetized Treasury debt to bankroll Cold War spending. By the 1960s, it was cranking the dollar printer into overdrive to fund Vietnam and LBJ's Great Society fantasies, policies that sent inflation to 6% by 1969, even as the Fed kept interest rates below inflation (a.k.a. financial sabotage of savers). The so-called "2% rule" was fiction; the Fed was juicing the system for political convenience long before Nixon officially torched the gold window. And let's not forget the Fed's role in the speculative Eurodollar market, where offshore dollar lending exploded without reserve requirements, an early preview of the unregulated shadow banking systems that would later implode in 2008.
The fatal flaw was baked into the Bretton Woods design from day one, a paradox economist Robert Triffin warned about in 1960: To serve as the world's reserve currency, the U.S. had to supply dollars globally, but the more dollars it printed to meet demand, the shakier confidence in its gold backing became. This wasn't an accident; it was a structural time bomb. By the late 1960s, foreign central banks were drowning in dollars they couldn't redeem without triggering a run on Fort Knox. Meanwhile, the U.S. hollowed out its own industrial base, outsourcing manufacturing to Asia and Germany while replacing real production with financialization, Wall Street alchemy turning debt into "wealth."
Fast-forward to today, and the chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance. The dollar's purchasing power has cratered, 92% loss since 1971. The national debt has ballooned to $35 trillion, nearly triple U.S. GDP. Decades of negative real interest rates have turbocharged asset bubbles, turning housing into a speculative casino while wages stagnate. And now, thanks to Washington's rampant weaponization of dollar sanctions, the BRICS nations are actively dismantling the dollar's reserve status, with China stockpiling gold and brokering oil deals in yuan. The Fed's response? More printing, more deficits, more pretending the laws of monetary gravity don't apply.
The breakdown wasn't caused by "abuse" of the dollar system, it was the inevitable result of a system designed to be abused. Fiat currencies don't fail because people mismanage them; they fail because they enable mismanagement. Gold didn't collapse in 1971, the U.S. government simply abandoned it to avoid fiscal accountability. Now we're stuck with the consequences: a financialized husk of an economy where billionaires mint fortunes in leveraged speculation while workers get paid in depreciating digits.